refugees deeply

An article in Refugees Deeply about the syrian telemental health network.

"WHEN PSYCHIATRISTS ANDRES Barkil-Oteo and Hussam Jefee-Bahloul met at Yale University in Connecticut three years ago, they quickly realized they had a lot in common.

“You don’t see a lot of Syrian psychiatrists at Yale,” Jefee-Bahloul says, laughing. “We were basically the only two.”

They had also been grappling with the same dilemma – how to use their mental health expertise to help Syrians and Syrian refugees. Both had left their homeland before the 2011 uprising to do psychiatry training in the U.S. and their distance from Syria’s descent into war weighed heavily on them.

“You read the news, but you are sitting very far away, so you feel like you can’t do much and there is a big sense of hopelessness,” Barkil-Oteo says. “Either you try not to think about it, or you occupy yourself with different things, or you try to do something.”

The pair formed a close friendship and professional collaboration that led to the launch in 2014 of the Syrian Telemental Health Network, an online platform helping mental health workers treating Syrians to access training and supervision from specialists around the world."